The Crowd in the Lyon Commune and the Insurrection of La Guillotiere

Abstract

Paris and its Commune have so completely dominated historians' accounts of what transpired in France during the spring of 1871 that until the last decade scant attention was paid to the behavior of the provinces. Next to Paris, it was Lyon that produced probably the most significant movement – the Commune of March 22nd-25th and its sequel, the insurrection in the quarter of La Guillotière on April 30th. In each of these incidents legal proceedings and investigations were begun by the regular judicial authorities, but the Army took over the trial proceedings by virtue of a decree of August 8, 1870, which had placed the Department of the Rhône in a state of siege. The affairs were given separate trials before a conseil de guerre in 1871. Dossiers were compiled on all those individuals killed or ordered arrested in connection with the revolutionary events of March and April and were deposited in the Archives Départementales du Rhône, Series R, under the incident's name and date. There were enough judicial investigations undertaken, and fortunately done in such a thorough manner, that the author found in them the basis for a most fascinating crowd study.